Gold power seller looking to automate the process.

I am trying to decide on a management or order management software for my ebay store. Currently we have approx 100 items and we sell roughly 300-500 items a month. We do approx 70/30 stock to drop shipments. we have our shipping department in a different location than theh sales so we would need something with multiple user logins.

What would you recomend for somethign like this? We currenntly only have an ebay store but woule like to expand to Amazon and to have our own website some day.

There is so many to chose from and we do not even know where to start.

It really depends on your full needs. In the US, ShipWorks is a good deal as it allows you to share a central database for your orders, you can assing statuses to your orders, batchprint invoices, batch print postage, interacts with USPS, FedEx, UPS and more. One of my favorite features is a picklist report that prints a list of the skus, descriptions, and number of items we are shipping at any given time.

It will pull orders from Ebay, Amazon, and many shopping carts. It is a little slow sometimes because we host our database on a central internet server where we can access from anywhere in the world. It is inexpensive - $29.95 a month per channel. So for eBay, Amazon, and shopping cart it would be about $100 per month. There are ways to reduce this cost but this is not bad.

It does not list items, manage inventory, or any of that type of things.

Thank you for the response! We are trying to break the mold of spending all of our time shipping & processing paperwork and use that time more wisely in growing our business. There are so many options out there and for every pro there are two cons. 95% of our sales are through ebay. Ideally we would like to have a system that we could manage our inventory and ship from that would then integrate all of the financial information into QuickBooks. Right now we are doing it the long and hard way. Sell an item, shipping through pay pal and manually putting in the quantity and weight of each item. We then have to input everything into QuickBooks. Is there something else out there that may work in conjunction with ShipWorks on the financial side, or does shipworks offer QuickBooks compatibility?

Well, we have faced the same conundrum as you. We currently use Channel Advisor for listing, website, and inventory solution. It has some issues. First, it is too expensive. For our volume, it is $500 per month plus 1% of gross revenue. Second, the website solution is very bad. It does not have features that are standard in all shopping carts - such as a mini cart, and has very little SEO help. It does not integrate with Quickbooks, supposedly they have partners that do but it was additional cost.

When listing on multiple markets, it allocates revenue to multiple markets. So if you have 2 items in stock and list one on Amazon and one on Ebay, you do not have any left on your website. Finally, it uses a cumbersome 3rd party checkout system, rather than eBay system, which customers complain about.

Now, to be fair, Channel Advisor does a good job of being able to list on eBay and especially Amazon. If you are not doing you own website, it may be worth the high price. I have not used it, but I would recommend looking at Vendio's solution first. It is less expensive but their website solution seems weak and I see few large sellers using their site and it does not integrate with ShipWorks.

I have yet to find a quickbooks solution that worked for our business. I bought an excel to IIF file converter that allows for easier uploading of transactions.

I was a developer for 10+ years (my masters is in CIS) so we are now working on developing our own solution to work with X-Cart. We felt we needed to have more control and feel that that the percentage of revenue fees are just excessive.

ecc or Webgility seems to be an end all to many online sellers frustrations as they state they are compatible for sellers that use: Amazon, eBay, CRE Loaded, CS-Cart, Cube Cart, IXXO, LiveCart, Magento, osCommerce, osCMax, Pinnacle Cart, uBercart, Virtue Mart, WordPress e-Commerce plugin, X-Cart, and Zen Cart.

IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE? IS IT??

We like what ShipWorks has to offer but QuickBooks integration is our next largest problem. The last company that I listed is bigredconsulting that claims to have a QuickBooks integration that works with PayPal.

ecc or webgility along with teapplix's intelliship seem almost too good to be true, and if so we are wondering if big red consulting's quick book integration could fill the financial integration void???